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These technologies further position Ubuntu Server as the best OS for scale-out computing. Quality also had a strong focus with continuous integration, deployment and testing of upstream OpenStack commits and automated testing of all cloud images on Amazon EC2 from 12.04 forward.

Format: 2 support for charms (which eliminates usage of python-only formatting in favor of json)

Java

Ubuntu 12.10 provides Apache Tomcat 7 as the default, supported version of Tomcat. Existing installations of tomcat6 will continue to function; its recommended that users upgrade to the tomcat7 package as soon as possible.

Apache Solr has been update to the latest 3.6.1 release. Apache Solr provides a horizontally scalable indexing and search platform based on Apache Lucene.

Jenkins has been updated to version 1.466.2, the latest LTS release from the Jenkins project.

Virtualisation

KVM has been update to version 1.2.0.

LXC has been updated to version 0.8.0, improvements include:

Migration of containers from OpenVZ to LXC has been eased with the addition of hooks at various point in a container's lifetime.

Customization of container security profiles has been eased by a reorganization of the apparmor profiles.

Nesting of containers has been made easier with custom apparmor profiles.

Improved container security with support for seccomp2 profiles and simple ecryptfs-backed containers.

Improved container automation with a new Python LXC API.

Xen has been updated to version 4.1.3.

Libvirt has been updated to version 0.9.13, which includes support for Ceph RBD volume snapshots.

Open vSwitch has been updated to version 1.4.3.

Storage

Ceph has been updated 0.48.2, the latest Argonaut LTS release.

Ceph provides a highly scalable distributed object storage technology and has been tested with XFS and ext4 during this development cycle.

Packages are now provided for the Ceph RADOS Gateway, a S3 and Swift compatible RESTful object storage solution backed by Ceph RADOS.

gperftools support on x86 architectures for improved memory allocation performance.

Automated deployment using Juju Charms.

Networking

Ubuntu 12.10 features the Floodlight OpenFlow network controller. Floodlight can be used with Openstack Quantum to provide full network control in cloud deployments.

ARM Support

Calxeda's EnergyCore ECX-1000 ("highbank") joins Marvell's ARMADA XP in the lineup of supported server-grade ARM SoCs on Ubuntu Server. Support has also been back-ported to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Configuration Management

Chef 10.12.0 has been re-introduced to Ubuntu in-conjunction with OpsCode.

Puppet has been updated to version 2.7.18.

Cloud Images

Query2, a new meta-data service for describing the Ubuntu Cloud Images and their availability, has been made available for testing and comment. This new meta-data service provides a verbose, machine-readable JSON formatted file that exhaustively describes the currently available Ubuntu Cloud Images hosted on cloud-images.ubuntu.com and official Ubuntu images in public clouds (currently limited to Amazon EC2). The "Query2″ data format is open for comment, and as such may change.

the default user ‘ubuntu' is no longer pre-baked into the images, but is now created by cloud-init. Further, using cloud-init cloud-config, users can be created at launch time, including the option of user-less instances.

Other

A new package ‘overlayroot' added as part of cloud-initramfs-tools allows easy utilization overlayfs for the root filesystem. This allows you to boot with changes made to filesystems to be diverted to another filesystem. The second filesystem can be encrypted, a tmpfs, or another disk. This is useful as a cloud-guest and is used by MAAS's ephemeral environment.

Due to a binary naming issue between the node and nodejs packages, nodejs now ships with its binary installed to /usr/bin/nodejs. Users of nodejs applications sourced from outside of the Ubuntu distribution should either use the nodejs-legacy package (which continues to provide /usr/bin/node) or migrate their applications to use the /usr/bin/nodejs interpreter.